Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

Your mom said it best. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. When price gets confused with total cost, it's possible to pay more overall while still buying a lower-priced commodity. An industry insider we spoke with put it succinctly:

A lot of clients say they want savings, but they don't. They want low rates, to push the risk to someone else -- and they want to make sure that you (the outsourcer) don't make money.

Even though the concept of "business service management" (BSM) has been debated, advocated, debased, and promoted for years, the immaturity in articulating its mechanisms is still somewhat pervasive. Yet IT has been, is, and will continue to be hammered for being disconnected from the business needs of the customers that it serves unless something fundamentally changes within IT.

In Part I of this three-part Executive Update series, we began our examination of a recent Cutter survey on the reorganization of the IT function. 1 Nearly three-quarters of reporting organizations had some type of IT reorganization in the past three years (81% in the past five).

In this two-part Executive Report series, we share in detail what suppliers have been saying to us and our colleagues about clients during the past two decades -- the things they wish clients would know or do as well as things they wish clients didn't know or do. In Part I, we covered the 10 statements suppliers make about establishing the outsourcing arrangement. Here in Part II, we examine another 10 pertaining to managing outsourced services.

Let's begin with the most basic of questions that senior executives are asking: "Why do we need or want a mobility strategy and, specifically, mobile applications for our existing and new customers and/or clients?" As one IT executive said, his challenge was convincing senior management that smartphones provide real business applications -- not just A

In the early era of Web commerce, the strategic goal for all Web producers was to achieve and maintain "stickiness" -- the ability to attract repeat visitors to the producer's site. The site-centric Web, for all its disruptive impact on industry, still seemed an awful lot like the physical world of commerce.